Thanks to the use of drones we managed to reduce the workflow for computing the volumes of each stockpile from 10 hours to 3. A 30 minutes flight is followed by the upload of the pictures on a server computer located at head office. Those pictures are then processed in 1 hour. After the processing, a point cloud is read in Recap, cleaned and transformed to an easy to use format in the Autodesk Suite. From there the pointcloud is transformed into a “surface” (Triangulated Irregular Network also called TIN) in Infraworks. Finally, thanks to predefined boundaries of the stockpiles and a map of the “empty” site, it is possible to rapidly generate a quantity report in Civil3D.

Different workflows and tools have been tested to obtain the volumes. The most accurate results are obtained using the workflow described above. The results obtained are within 3% of the measurement the surveyor took on site the same day.